What Is Afrofuturism? Part 11: Cosmic Yoruba

Cosmic Yoruba wrote a piece on Afrofuturism from various African perspectives. Read an excerpt of “’We’ve Been to the Moon and Back:’ Afro-futurism in Music” and the rest at This Is Africa:

Although Afro-futurism doesn’t have one clear-cut definition, for the purpose of this article we’ll go with the one that defines it as a study of science-fiction themes with particular emphasis on the way advances in technology will affect the Black – that is African diasporic – experience. Afro-futurism is a response to any imagined future that excludes Black people, perspectives from Black culture, as well as African history, artists and writers, and those invested in Afro-futurism are attempting to include and represent Black people in the future as they imagine it.

The first person to use the term was apparently Mark Dery, who defined Afro-futurism as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture – and more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced – might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afro-futurism’.” Afro-futuristic fashion, literature and music boomed especially in the 70s and 80s, envisioning a brighter future for oppressed people.

Nonetheless, Afro-futurism is still an emerging genre, so there isn’t that much information about the subject out there, and what there is is scattered all over the place. Most of the discussions on the subject posit Afro-futurism as solely relating to the African-American experience. However, with the growing interest in the place of science fiction in Africa, and in the way Africans imagine themselves in the future, Afro-futurism is slowly being looked at from the African perspective as well….